Kiss from a Rose
by wintergreen825
Summary: In the middle of Harry's gray childhood, there was a spot of brightness, like a kiss from a rose on the gray.


**Legal Disclaimer:** I own my stuff, but not the original source material. That belongs to whoever. Also, the opinions and interpretations I use here may not reflect the same in said whoever that owns the source material. Look, I'm just a poor college librarian. Suing me isn't going to get you anything but tears.

**Warning:** This work may be offensive to some readers. Feel free to back out if need be.

**Author's Note:** So…I've got no explanation for this. I got a wild hair at wee hour o'clock after jerking out of a dead sleep. I wrote this, went back to sleep, and proofed it when I woke up. I may be stretching the definitions of "sentient being" and "able to form a QPR", and I'm about 86% certain that Harry's not fully human by the end of this (which is, like, yikes, because I still wrote him as Desi & autistic), but hey, have some hurt/comfort fluff with Harry and his very venomous zucchini.

**Submitting Info:  
****Stacked with:** Hogwarts (Term 12); MC4A (WiB; TY; DP; Share; T3; SN; FR; O3; SHoE; AD; FPC; BAON; ToS; StL; SIN; NC; LL; PP; SoC; FF; NCR; RC; Star; Fence; ER; MLG; Rum; Cluster; VV; MT; WF)  
**Individual Challenges:** Rainbow Focus; Scaly Tales; Bloomin' Time; No Heterosexual Explanation; Habitual (Y); Love Language; Point of Know Return; Sett to Destroy; Creature People; Unaccompanied Minors; Seeds; Shipmas; No Proof; Golden Times; Interesting Times; Old Shoes (Y); Themes & Things A [Love] (Y); Themes & Things B [Protection] (Y); Ethnic & Present; Neurodivergent; Quiet Time; Letter of the Day; Tiny Terror; Rian-Russo Inversion; Flags & Ribbons; Setting Sail; Hold the Mayo; Short Jog; Click Bait It; Yellow Ribbon (Y); Yellow Ribbon Redux; No Punny Business  
**House:** Hufflepuff  
**Assignment No.:** Term 12 – Assignment 3  
**Subject (Task No.):** Culinary Arts (Task#8: Write about being considered odd/different.)  
**Other Hogwarts Challenges:** Insane Prompt Challenge [70] (Melancholy); 365 [141] (Hollow)  
**Other MC4A Challenges:** Wi Bingo [5E] (White)  
**Representation(s):** Asexual Harry Potter; Rose Adder (OC); Harry & Rose QPR; Parselmouth, Autistic, & Desi Harry Potter  
**Bonus Challenges:** Suddenly Audrey; Second Verse (Ladylike; Not a Lamp; Persistence Still; White Dress; Found Family; Nontraditional; Zucchini Bread; Middle Name; Unwanted Advice; Car in a Tutu; For the Vine; Lovely Coconuts; Most Human Bean; Muck & Slime; Corvid Brain; Hot Apple; Inky Shadow; Uncivil Obedience; Under the Bridge; Easy Zephyr); Chorus (Odd Feathers; Pear-Shaped; Wabi Sabi; Machismo; Peddling Pots; Bust a Cap; Mouth of Babes; Tomorrow's Shade; Larger than Life; Unicorn; Vid Tangent; Abandoned Ship; Surprise!; Turtle-Duck; Forked Path; Some Beach; Getting On; Lost Llama; Mermaid)  
**Tertiary Bonus Challenges:** T3 (Tether); SN (Rail; Spare); FR (Liberation); O3 (Oath); TY (Slainte; Enfant); RoIL (Amelioration); SHoE (Oblique); DP (Taciturn; Yearn); AD (Amphibian)  
**Word Count:** 1264

(^^)  
**Kiss from the Rose**  
(^^)

Harry chewed his thumbnail as he watched the other kids shriek as they chased each other. It was different from the Harry Hunting game that Dudley and his friends had started. For one thing, everyone seemed to have a turn being both a chaser and the chased. For another thing, Harry couldn't even imagine any of Dudley's gang giving him sloppy kisses when they caught him.

The video they had watched earlier in the week had said that what the other kids were doing was normal for their ages. Harry hadn't really thought about it until the video had pointed it, but he guessed that the chase and kiss game had been happening more this school year than it had the last one. It wasn't just limited to boys chasing girls either. He had seen Ashley Thorne sneaking a kiss with Sarah Robinson behind the tire climbing pile just the other day, and then they had both kissed Matthew Evans until his face had turned all flushed.

Harry didn't understand any of it, no matter what the video had said or what he read in the books that he read in the school library as often as he could get away with skipping recess. He had tried to ask the counselor who had shown them the video, making sure to lag behind when the other boys had rushed out to lunch so that Dudley couldn't see him talking to an adult and tattle on him. The man had only patted Harry on the back and reassured him that he was just a late bloomer.

Harry wasn't certain what that meant exactly, because he wasn't a flower. Maybe the counselor was confused because he was so much smaller than the other boys in his year. Or maybe it was the long hair that he had because Aunt Petunia had given up trying to cut it in order to control the wild way it curled. Dudley made jokes all the time about how much Harry looked like a girl because those things. From what he had overheard from his favorite hiding spot in the bushes behind the climbing pile, the girls' video had likened their changes to flowers.

Watching the other kids just let Harry know that there was yet another way that he could be different from those around him. Harry sighed before going back to his nail-biting. Maybe if he watched for long enough, he could figure out how to at least fake whatever was happening.

Maybe it would be enough to finally make Aunt Petunia like him.

As long as he was dreaming, he might as well dream big, after all.

(^^)

Harry found the adder shortly before Dudley's tenth birthday. Like himself, she was darker than others of her kind, being a deep green that blended in almost perfectly with the shady depths of the front rose bushes. Harry thought she looked particularly lovely when she was curled up in a bed of the white petals. She allowed him to voice that belief, basking in his admiration of her beauty like it was sunlight upon a trusted rock. She struggled to understand the strange habits of humans in a lot of the same ways that Harry did, but her biggest difficulty came in the concept of names. She just didn't understand the necessity of them, even if she did accept their importance to humans.

She gave Harry permission to call her _Rose_ with all the grace of the Princess and all the regal countenance of the Queen.

Harry thought that he loved her more than he had ever loved anything else. He loved her dry tone as she discussed the merits of just biting Dudley the next time that he kicked up the mulch that Harry had carefully distributed around the various garden beds. Harry barely managed to talk her out of the idea. She did give him a delicate nip to the meat of his palm as both punishment and reward.

The tiny wound burned for what seemed like forever. Yet it wasn't a painful burn, not really. It was more like the times when the Dursleys had a fire going and Harry had to feed it a new log. The heat coming off the flames would make him feel crinkly and tender, but it was always so much better than how cold he had been just moments prior that he couldn't think of anywhere he would rather be. And with each new nip that Rose gave him, the pain lessened while the welcomed warmth grew.

By the time school came around again, Harry had learned to accept his relatives' dislike of him. He learned to accept the feeling of oddness that filled him, too. Rose's own ambivalence towards other snakes, even other adders like herself, had helped. Oddballs may not belong to the groups they were from, but they could belong together.

Who cares about kissing girls when he had the warm nips from his Rose?

Kisses didn't enter his dreams at all, big or small.

(^^)

All of the parents had been invited to the primary graduation ceremony. Aunt Marge had even come down for the event, bringing along her beloved Ripper. Harry made sure to keep Rose close to him at all times, since he knew exactly how destructive Ripper could be when left to his own devices. A few of the other kids had extra relatives there as well. Yet no one else lacked parents entirely.

No one except for Harry was an unwanted orphan.

Rose kept up an extra dry commentary on the entire boring proceeding to distract him from the increasingly hollow feeling in his guts at the reminder how he didn't fit anywhere in Little Whinging. Harry knew he should be more grateful to the one friend he had, and he vowed to make it up to her later, but right then, the feeling of being the odd one just hurt too much. If Aunt Petunia would be believed, then his parents would not be proud of him, especially not when he just barely graduated with the rest of his year. Of course, doing better than that had been impossible, not when he wasn't allowed to do better than Dudley, who had about as much interest in schoolwork as Harry had in kissing anyone.

A gentle nip, all warmth and no burn despite dot of blood he felt welling up from it, drew his attention away from his melancholy thoughts. The headmistress of the school was instructing the entire dinning hall full of people to raise their cups full of punch to the graduates. Harry raised his own cup of water as he barely kept from snickering as she said with no reservations that she believed them to all have bright futures. Rose had no compunctions against letting out her own version of it. It made her tongue flick through the drop of blood her bite had drawn.

Maybe, just maybe, the headmistress was right.

Maybe, just maybe, Harry could look forward to improvements next year. After all, Harry would be going to the local secondary while Dudley went to the same public school that Uncle Vernon had attended for secondary. Without Dudley or his gang (since all of them had been accepted to various public schools themselves) around, maybe Harry could convince someone to befriend him. Maybe it wouldn't even matter how different he was from the other local kids.

Maybe Harry could afford to dream, just a little bit.

After all, he would eleven in just over a month.

Anything could happen.


End file.
